One of the significant educational benefits that users receive from computer systems is the ability to interact with the computer system, and thereby receive personalized instruction, without the constraints of group instruction. For example, although viewing a film or slideshow in a group setting is educational, a user may learn much more and/or better retain the information when viewing the same information on a computer system in which the user can pause, replay, link to related information and so forth as needed, and at a chosen pace.
When the educational experience is one related to touring a location such as a historic site, films and slideshows are not the same as actually exploring the site, as among other drawbacks, such films and slideshows are limited to that of the filming author's viewing perspective. At the same time, it is impossible for everyone to personally view every site in which he or she may be interested in visiting. In fact, some sites cannot be visited by anyone because they no longer exist, at least not in the way they once historically appeared. Thus, at best such sites can only be recreated.
For example, for hundreds of years, historians, archeologists and scholars have tried to capture, observe and archive for the future how ancient historical architectural sites appeared in time, particularly in the prime of their existence. To this end, literature, drawings, maps and charts are studied by experts, with various theories presented and discussed until a generally accepted consensus is adopted and taught, at least until better evidence or a better theory arises. Artists' renderings have typically been used as the tool that provides images of how the experts believed the sites appeared.
A few attempts have been made to represent historical and other sites using a combination of photographs and digital rendering. However, although multimedia software now exists as an educational tool, the massive amount of data needed to accurately and comprehensively present such information to computer users has not heretofore been able to provide high-quality results with such software.
Moreover, none of these prior attempts create the illusion of first person exploration, at least not to any reasonably realistic extent, even though such realistic first person exploration can be a highly effective educational tool. For example, a significant improvement to interactive computing for educational purposes is taught by U.S. Pat. No. 6,234,802, entitled “VIRTUAL CHALLENGE SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR TEACHING A LANGUAGE,” assigned to the assignee of the present invention and hereby incorporated by reference. The technology generally described in this patent provides a three-dimensional virtual world through which a user navigates, while interacting (an in particular, speaking) with various virtual people in order to learn a language.
While this works very well as an educational tool, the virtual world is created in advance, and the interaction controlled, as needed by the program authors. For example, the portion of the world displayed at any time is limited to images which a three-dimensional rendering engine and video hardware can easily handle.
However, with an environment such as an architectural site, the author does not get to choose the images that appear in the virtual world, but rather needs to represent them as is (or as experts theorize they appeared). As a consequence, the author cannot simply create the world as needed to match the hardware limitations. Indeed, with an actual site, there are possibly millions of polygons that are needed to represent a site with any reasonable amount of quality and realism. Conventional CAD programs or the like cannot process such amounts of information fast enough to represent a site in a real-time interactive setting with any reasonable amount of quality. Such programs cannot pass the information to the graphics cards, as existing graphics cards also would be overwhelmed by the large amount of polygons that need to be handled in real-time.